Goodbye, Precious Lab Bench

Back in August I told you guys about how I had moved away from doing benchwork in my evil global biotech company’s R&D department and became a Technical Support scientist. However, all this time I have had one last R&D project looming over me, awaiting outside collaborators who would come in and do lab work with me. I had promised to help, and I’m a lab rat who honors his word, no matter how stupid the project turns out to be. So I kept a lab bench over in the lab, staunchly refusing to let anyone steal away my precious pipettors and other lab equipment, and growled like a dog over its food bowl when anyone wanted to take my “turf”.

The project was one of those super top-secret things, and all I can say is it involved a great deal of money. It went all the way up the food chain to the very top. Even the CEO got involved. They kept saying the project would happen, and just as I and the other folks involved would get things ready, the visit would be postponed at the very last moment. Finally the project fell through completely and was cancelled.

If I tell you any more about the project, they’ll chop off my head. I’d rather like to keep my head. I’d be a lot less handsome without it.

So after the project was cancelled, I finally went and cleaned off my bench and refrigerators, and handed everything over to the lab rats who really needed them. In the process I threw out years worth of needlessly-archived samples and reagents.

This was a surprisingly poignant action. Too many of the samples I threw out represented projects that were never finished, or had showed very promising results that could have led to good products that customers needed (and still need), but were “backburnered” due to the politics around that place. It made me reminiscent of the “good ole days” when researchers there were more free to explore novel techniques and develop products they felt were useful. Now projects have to go through too many committees, bureaucrats, and profit/cost projection studies before you can do any significant experimentation. That just kills innovation. Doing novel research requires some initial exploration. This is one of the reasons I left R&D at that company. All I do with the R&D folks now is advising on projects.

So I left my bench sparkly clean and walked away saying (as I have hundreds of times) how much more I love my new position. I don’t growl as much any more.


Addendum (3/3/08): Speaking of good projects killed by politics, today I was in a think-tank meeting populated with R&D scientists, product managers, and even a couple directors, to plan out the next year’s R&D activities and new product development in a particular product niche. One of the most promising product target areas turned out to match a product I led development on back in 2004, but was killed due to politics – by one of the very people in that meeting. It was satisfying to see him eat humble pie as I pointed out how the product would meet the necessary criteria and how he and others had killed it. To think, we’ve lost out on more than three years of potential sales on a product that currently has no competition in the marketplace! At least I have the satisfaction of knowing my hard work may not have been for nothing, and the product might still be released.

Image taken from HERE.

Now I've Gone And Done It!

I've finally done it. It became official last Friday. I've managed to escape the oblivion of being the eternal lab tech by leaving my job for a slightly better one which has nothing to do whatsoever with developing cutting edge new science products or experimentation into the Great Unknown. I start in a week.

Oh, don't worry, you Angry Lab Rat blogophiles, you eager readers of biotech woes and ponderings in breaking science news, I am still with the same evil global biotech conglomerate, assimilators of all smaller companies that have anything at all even somewhat similar to our products. "We are the Borg. You will be assimilated." And I'll still be blogging to you on the exciting world of science news and oddities.

I didn't even have to move to change jobs. In this industry, the best way to get a promotion and raise is to move to another company. But I don't care to move. Rather, I've chosen the second-best method: I've changed departments.

Technically I won't be a "lab rat" any more, as I'll be hanging up my lab coat for a long time, possibly forever, though in some circles I'll still be considered a scientist.

I've left the comfy confines of my lab bench and corner office in the R&D department and taken up residence in a cubicle. Yes, I said cubicle. I didn't think it possible, a few years ago I would have scoffed at the idea, but I am now even more a part of Dilbertworld, awash in computer hell and dealing directly with customers as a technical assistance person. You know the ones, the people you call when your product craps out, fails to meet expectations, or completely befuddled you because you didn't bother to read the product manual. Why bother reading such a long document when you'd rather have the pleasure of listening to canned music while waiting on the phone to ask a live person? Well, now I'm that person. And, no, I don't work in India. At least, not yet. [My evil global biotech company has a facility in India (and in China, too!), but so far they've only outsourced our R&D work, oddly enough].

Yes, I'll be The Helpful Guy, like the ones you see on TV commercials for computer or phone companies, headset placed firmly on the temples, smiling and perky (and usually female), answering in a pleasant yet competent voice, "Technical Services. How may I help you today?" When you see them on TV, you get the feeling that they must be morning people, as happy-go-lucky as June Cleaver, and the sort that goes home to read product manuals while listening to fizzy 80's pop rock. If that persona is what makes you feel good about talking to me, be my guest. If you call me, feel free to imagine my appearance any way you wish. No, I'm not short, fat, and extremely hairy. Are you kidding? Think Brad Pitt, baby! Really, I couldn't possibly be exaggerating. It's a good thing all you'll experience is my voice. If you saw me in person, you'd have to jump my bones. That could make answering your technical question difficult, to say the least.

I'm reading your mind right now. I know what you're thinking. I have that super power. It's what will make me good at my new job. Some of you are wondering what parasite crawled into my noggin and affected my judgment. Or you're wondering how many solvents I've been sniffing in the lab. Or you think I've simply lost my mind.

These are valid concerns. But losing one's sanity can be relieving, in a sort of escapist way. Solvents don't bother you once they burn away your nasal membranes. And brain parasites only hurt when they bore through the skull; once they're in the brain you don't feel them any more.

Think of all the aspects I'm losing: a nice office all to myself, a couple active lab benches, the chance to play with really cool and expensive instrumentation, the snooty glamor of being able to claim I'm a "scientist", and, oh yeah, the ability to invent and develop cutting-edge technologies to help the scientists of the world make the next breakthrough discovery.

It's that last point that led me to get into biotech to begin with. Unfortunately, the way programs are currently run at my company makes innovation very very difficult for folks in my position. And in the past two years changes in the company and my role in it have actually pushed me back about, oh, four years in my career development, to the point that lab rats like myself almost never have the ability to make programs of their own innovative ideas. It makes me feel a tad bit like Harry Potter living at the Dursley's, afraid to show even a hint of my true nature for fear of being beaten back into bland submission. Add to that the extreme overload of work and the expectation that, despite having a family, you should work late hours, come in at night, and work on the weekends in order to meet expectations. No thanks. Been there. I've served my time. This will be the first job I've ever had with set hours: 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, Monday - Friday. Pinch me, I'm dreaming.

Sure, I'll be in a cubicle and dealing with the occasional clueless or even mean customers, and I'll have to be able to pull random specific details out of my ass about any of the nearly 3000 products my company sells within a few minutes of answering the phone (or email) for whatever obscure method the customer is using, but I'm willing to take it for the chance to come home at a reasonable hour and have free weekends, for the same pay and benefits, and working with a close-knit team.

And there's another great benefit: I will become The Great Guru.

. . . at least about my company and its products. After eight and a half years of working at my company, I know a great many details about the products, many dozens of which I invented, developed, or been part of R&D teams on. But that pales in comparison to the huge expanse of additional knowledge I will gain in only a couple years of answering random questions and coming up with correct answers about any of our products, and getting PAID to learn as much as I can about them, and the wide myriad of differing techniques our customers use them for. This is precisely why people who go into my company's Technical Services department go on to business management, program management, and R&D group leadership positions within the company. They are The Great Gurus of the company, without whom my company would suffer. And you'd better believe they get paid a whole lot more than I make now. The two folks who returned to R&D after being in Tech Services for a few years are now walking encyclopedias worshipped by other R&D staff. When one recently threatened to leave the company, the company leadership (one of whom had also been in Tech Services at one point) bent over backward to keep him, giving him a sizable increase in salary and a special position invented just for him so he would stay.

That makes a cubicle seem a LOT more appealing. I wouldn't mind being worshipped a little.

Besides, the Tech Services folks get free donuts. I'm a sucker for free food.


Images adapted from HERE and HERE.

Science Salary Survey

The results of a survey on scientist salaries was just released in the current issue of Microscopy Today:

http://www.microscopy-today.com/MT2007_Salary_Survey.pdf

I’m always leery about these surveys. Not because I think they are inaccurate somehow, but because I always seem to fall at the lower end, or less, of whatever bracket fits me. That just makes me angry at my cheapskate company. But, seeing as how this particular survey is most suited for me, given it falls in my particular line of work, I took the bait. As usual, it makes me none too comfortable to see the results.

First they compared salaries by discipline. I’m in the biological sciences. Naturally, they fall lower than either physical sciences (like nanotechnology) or traditional sciences (like chemistry and physics). Bio peaks around $51-60K, where the others plateau at higher salaries. Okay, I’m used to it. Next!

Then they looked at salary by institution type. Academic falls lowest, peaking around $51-60K. I’m glad I left academics. I don’t enjoy starving for my hard work. But Industry scores only slightly higher at the next bracket, $61-70K. Fine. I’d live with that. But Industry also has a second peak, much higher, at $91-110K. Those would be the “Big Talking Heads” who run the company. Yay them. Government work earned a bit more, but the best of all were vendors and suppliers. Their salaries just keep going up up up. I’ve had a few chances over the years to take positions with some instrument manufacturers selling and being a tech for their products, but I just couldn’t stomach the idea of traveling all the time.

When they looked at salary by title, there weren’t any real surprises. Students earn slave wages, while corporate managers get the biggest slice of the pie. You should see the graph! Professors earned a pretty good salary, peaking in the $91-110K bracket. Pretty good, if you can weather the process to get there.

The kicker came with the comparison of salary versus educational degree. No surprise that doctorates earn more than bachelor’s, which earn more than high school. But what surprised me is that there is really no difference between bachelor’s and master’s level. So that extra two years I spent earning my master’s degree didn’t really do anything for me in terms of potential salary. So if you’re going beyond a batchelor’s, skip the master’s and head straight into a doctoral position (which most folks seem to do anyhow, it seems). And what about post-docs? Forget it. If you think you’re going to get more money by earning your doctoral then post-doc-ing around the country, there was no significant difference there, salary-wise. Maybe you’ll be more hire-able in certain careers, though.

Years of experience only mattered for the lowest and the highest pay brackets. All those in the middle were pretty mixed, meaning that if you’re a newbie, you ain’t getting’ squat, and if you hang in there long enough, at least 26 years, there’s a slim chance you’ll move up in the pay bracket. But given the volatile nature of science careers, I laugh at your chances.

So there you go. If you’re a scientist, now you’ll know approximately how much you’re worth, or not worth, compared to 624 respondents to the survey. Now go buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and make yourself feel better about the years you spent in academics and the loss of social life to get you to your lab bench. Then use this info to ask for a raise. You can do it!


Image taken from HERE.

The Lab Vending Machine?

Here’s the scenario: You’re working late at night in the lab, trying to beat the deadline imposed upon you by your tyrannical manager and the irrational business types. It’s the weekend. You’re all alone at work. You’re at a critical step in your protocol. You open the fridge to grab that all-important enzyme for your gene splicing experiment and – oh my god, it’s gone! That f*ckin’ lab tech Bob down the hall borrowed it without asking and didn’t return it again! You run madly through the halls of your lab building, frantically throwing open lab fridges to look through other people’s badly-labeled reagent boxes trying to find your vial, or anyone’s vial, of your precious enzyme. Resigned to failure, you stumble back to your lab to figure out how to save your experiment, your project, your deadline, and, while you’re at it, your miserable career in biotech (or doctorate project or whatever is most applicable to you if you are in science).

Well never fear! Before you start contemplating hiring a hit man for Bob, now there are vending machines for your precious reagent!

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1184297126249120.xml&coll=7

Yes, you too can enjoy the modern marvel of vending machines. It’s not just for cola, chips, and soggy sandwiches anymore! With the press of a button combo and a swipe of a payment card, a bag of your favorite enzyme or E. coli bacteria will neatly screw out of the chosen slot and fall to the opening like a bag of pretzels, any time of the day or night.

Of course, that little vial of reagent costs a heck of a lot more than 75 cents. Try up to $200.00. Careful with your button-pushing!

It’s important to note that the lab vending machines are situated directly next to the cola and chip machines. Given the groggy state I’m in during those late-night lab “emergencies,” I’m just as likely to choose the wrong frickin’ machine and wind up munching on a vial of DNA while shaking potato chips onto my lab samples. Mmmmm, GFP-transformed bacteria. [insert slobber sounds]

And what do you do if your all-important, $150-bag of enzymes gets hung up on the dispensor? Shake and bang the vending machine, of course!

Ya gotta love convenience-technology.


Image from HERE.

A Run-In With The Ice Queen

I wouldn’t say I’m a hateful guy, but I found myself in an interesting situation yesterday which exposes my dark side.

Here’s a little backstory first: Many years ago, before my biotech company was bought out by an evil global conglomerate, we were an evil privately-owned business. There were three people in the company whom the employees considered particularly mean and immoral: one of the company founders, the Bio R&D director, and the Human Resources Director.

The company founder was a crusty old bastard who had some good product ideas, but had absolutely no social skills. He ran the company back in my early days there. If you dared to raise objections to his opinions, he’d just as likely fire you as ignore you. Happily, he retired to a third-world country and is now trying to fix his Karma by helping orphans.

The Bio R&D Director was famous for taking credit for other peoples’ ideas, panning off his own personal failings upon his employees, and pitting employees against each other. When enough of us complained to HR about him, HR’s decision was to move him to another department. When he had run amok in the new department and received the same sort of complaints, what was HR’s verdict? Promote him, of course! As my boss at the time said, “Shit floats.” He was given his own facility at another site in the company (which had been recently bought out at that point). Sadly, that fool is still part of the company, and his “special” facility is now failing miserably. I am watching intently to see what happens next and drooling at the prospect of laughing openly at him as he carries his personal effects out the door for the last time.

The HR Director, a beady-eyed woman named Sherrie, seemed to delight in the suffering of the employees. She hired and fired employees not by some detailed methodology, but seemingly on the whim of upper management decisions. There were a lot of relatives of upper management hired into unsuitable roles. A lot of good employees were let go because they didn’t agree with how things were run, and a lot of bad managers kept despite serious flaws. She saw her role as solely representing upper management to the employees. Of course, that wasn’t what she told the employees. She was always quick to say that any concerns or grievances should be brought to her, but when they were they inevitably wound up being used against the employee by the very bosses that generated the grievance. Unfortunately, I was one of those unwitting victims when I once complained to her via email about my boss not updating my woefully outdated job description (which any promotions would be based on in the coming weeks), but instead of addressing the problem, she forwarded the email to my boss. My boss flipped out. The job description was updated, but I didn’t get promoted (again). The only negative comment he put on my performance review: “needs to improve his email communication skills and tactfulness”, and the only example he could come up with was the email to HR. Luckily, Sherrie was booted a couple years ago when my global biotech company decided to run HR out of their home office.

So fast-forward a couple years to yesterday evening. My wife and I hired a babysitter and went out to a movie. After the movie, we decided to have a rare treat and went to a local Baskin-Robbins for ice cream. And who did we see dishing out our ice cream? Sherrie!! Oh, how delicious it was to see the person who was once the representation of evil dressed in a restaurant uniform and scooping out my mousse-chocolate ice cream. How suiting that the woman I most regard as having a cold heart is the one dishing out ice cold food to others. I wanted to gloat, wanted to point and laugh openly and bark commands to the once high and mighty evil minion. But I didn’t. I took the high road, kept my composure, and said hi. I even engaged in a little somewhat friendly banter. Decrepit as she had been, I felt a tiny pang of sympathy that she would have to take a minimum wage position. A fall from a position of authority. I took my ice cream and looked in my wallet for a tip.

And then she revealed that she owned the restaurant.

My heart sunk. Cosmic destiny had failed me. Whatever deal she had struck with the devil had remained, keeping her in charge, even if it was just an ice cream shop and a handful of employees. I hardly had the will to eat my dessert, and I urged my unknowing wife to eat outside and to flee the heavy atmosphere. Alas, my wife wanted to eat at a table inside, and thus we did, and I was happy when I finally finished my cone and left. I didn’t say goodbye to Sherrie, and never intend to return.

Oh well. Shit floats. At least she haunts people other than me.


Image taken from HERE.

Public Speaking For Scientists

In my profession as a biotech scientist, good public speaking skills are essential. In fact, having bad public speaking skills, particularly due to shyness, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins for Lab Rats. The last thing you want to do is get up in front of a bunch of scientists and look like a moron, especially if they know as much as you do about areas of your own study, and possibly more. In any given crowd there will be novices and experts. Somehow you have to appeal to them all while giving them at least one good nugget of information they could fine intellectually stimulating. The big thing is for people to overcome their fear and make themselves comfortable standing up in front of (sometimes) dozens or even hundreds of perfect strangers and sounding both knowledgeable and relaxed. Today’s blog from Scott Adams was about that. HERE is a good article on overcoming that fear.

Scientists aren’t shy when it comes to pointing out flaws in your protocols or logic. In fact, it’s what we are trained to do. So much so that when the question and answer period comes at the end (as most are prone to do), you expect critical questions to be asked about why certain choices were made in the experiments and how we made certain assumptions about the data and results, and you have to explain. Sometimes you will gather new insights about your process and can go back to the lab to test them out. That’s the real value of these presentations. If, being a scientist, you give a presentation and there are no questions or comments at the end, then either you’ve blown them away with your incredible genius, or you’ve failed in your mission entirely and wasted a great deal of your time and that of the audience. As much as I would love to think I fall into the genius category, I would have to admit my failure. Luckily, I can’t think of any talks I’ve given lately that were complete failures that way.

Inevitably there will be one older professor in the audience who will glibly point out some crucial mistake you had made that surely could have avoided if you had only read their seminal paper on whatever obscure protein or cellular process they’ve studied for decades. If it’s a good idea, you say so, and get the reference from him later. Probably 90% of the comments are that way. If not, you say “Thanks, I’ll look into that.” That’s usually code for “Thanks for pushing your own interests, dumbass, and abusing your authority to make me look bad in front of my peers. I’ll ignore your comment.”

I’ve taken a couple public speaking courses, but only because I went to a liberal arts college. They were taught by the sociology department. Oddly, science departments don’t seem to include speaking classes. This always perplexed me, given the importance of it. It seems they assume you’ll somehow pick up the skills by watching other (sometimes very bad) speakers during the seminar series. So the classes you learn from are geared more toward speaking from a marketing perspective (“Here’s why my product is a good one”), or a dry information perspective (“Here are the latest sales figures”). Science is at its core an interactive discipline based partly on rational thinking and partly on peer review. The talks have to keep that in mind (“Here’s my data, now tell me where it’s lacking”). Oh, sure, you have to enunciate, make eye contact, not rely on notecards, not stutter and all that sort of thing, too (HERE is a starting place for learning). That much is in common, and scientists by and large are really good about those basics. But here are some additional recommendations that I am vainly going to make to my fellow scientists, even if I am sometimes guilty of not following all of them:


DON’T BE BORING. For crying out loud, reams of data and slide after slide of chemical structures will put your audience to sleep in minutes. Only the worst geeks will stay awake. In every experiment is a story crying to get out. Pretend you’re trying to tell your grandma about the purpose of your experiment. The story you tell will inevitably be reductionist to the point of being interesting. Refer to that story off and on through the talk. Talking about your studies of filamentous actin and its role in G2 states of cellular division is dry. Adding that the protein conjugate you used is highly poisonous and was purified from the Death Cap Mushroom is much more interesting.

HUMOR IS GOLDEN. Scientists love stories of how experiments went wrong but resulted in unforeseen eureka moments, or how they got fed up with someone and wanted to prove them wrong, only to prove them right but then one-up them. Some scientists are so dry in their presentations that you wonder if they’re drugged.

DON’T BE FLASHY. Leave the animated graphics and marketing logos for the sales folks. Scientists just want the facts. Nifty text fly-ins and superfluous decorations from clip art are simply annoying. One example of doing it right was when a guy I work with recently showed a slide of a simple Excel chart on a white background. He said it was the only flashy slide he had with animation then proceeded to grab the cloth screen with his hand and shake it, making the text scintillate.

GET TO THE FRICKIN’ POINT, ALREADY. Scientists love to go on and on about their specialty. Who can blame them? Many have spent half a decade focusing on one obscure metabolic pathway or gene studied by only a handful of other scientists around the world. Chances are, though, most of their audience could care less about most of that work. They really just want the highlights. Know who your audience is and gear it to them.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO TURN OFF THE PROJECTOR. Here's a big one. Nearly every presentation I’ve seen in the last 10 years has been solely a PowerPoint presentation. That’s okay. That’s the best way to get across most of the points. But somewhere along the way it seems most of us scientists have forgotten the fine art of turning up the room lights, raising the screen, and putting away the laser pointers. Draw on a chalkboard. Gesture with your hands. Get out from behind the frickin’ podium and use the space up front. Maybe, in your wildest moments, even produce props to pass around the room, such as chemical models or actual (non-toxic) samples from the lab. It’s so rarely done, I would consider the presentation a novelty worthy of attending even if I otherwise would have no interest in the topic.


So, to my tens of readers, what have you done to make your presentations more interesting?


Image taken from HERE.

It's The Dead Of Night And I'm At Work

As I write this it is the dead of night, 12:54AM Friday night (or, really, Saturday morning) . . . and I am at my desk at work.

I just finished crunching a load of data so more work can be done this weekend. Such is life in an evil global biotech company.

I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right. I’m a f*ckin’ slave to my job.

So why am I sitting here at work surrounded by pages of data, rubbing raw, bleary eyes and hating life when I should be at home, snug in a warm, soft bed next to my lovely wife and falling into a coma-like sleep? Two words: irrational management.

I’ve been working like a frickin’ maniac for months now on a product which is basically a line extension of an existing product family. By the time the product came to me from our chemists, the Big Talking Heads who run the programs around here figured they could just hand it off to me and my team and we’d simply prove that the rosy image of their product was correct – that their product was the king of products, able to outshine all our others, cure cancer, stop aging, and fight off packs of ravenous dogs while emitting the lovely aroma of baked bread. They figured we could do all of our analyses in a single month and be done with it.

But no one asked me – the one actually doing the work.

In the 8 years I’ve been here I’ve been responsible, at one level or another, for development of 34 products. NONE of them took only a single month, including a number of much simpler products.

I and my team are now at the very end of the product’s R&D stage – three and a half months later. But, being irrational and wanting everything to be done now-now-now, the Big Talking Heads have put pressure on my boss. My boss responded, as he always does, by saying yes to all their demands and moved up the finish date.

Again, he didn’t ask my opinion.

Now I and a colleague have to pull double-duty (including tonight and this weekend) to try to squeeze in most of the rest of the testing. Some testing simply won’t be done in time, which puts us in the awkward position of having to choose which crucial data to leave out. My boss will look good for having gotten the job done earlier, but guess who’s going to have to answer for any holes in the data. And the product quality will suffer. If we’d only had a couple more weeks, as I had planned well ahead of time, all of the R&D work would be completed.

Idiots.

Image taken from HERE.

Worked To Death - Literally

An article was released today stating that “a record number of Japanese people literally worked themselves to death last year, despite campaigns to ease the country's notoriously long office hours. Some 355 workers fell severely ill or died from overwork in the year to March, the highest figure on record and 7.6 percent up from the previous year, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labour said.”

http://www.physorg.com/news98605002.html

You have to hand it to those Japanese business types; they really dedicate themselves to their jobs. Gotta drive that capitalist bullet train, ya know. Capitalism was our main contribution to the Japanese after we blasted the hell out of them in WWII. Call it a sympathy gift from one evil empire to another. We should have seen it coming, what with the extreme dedication the people of Japan have to their work ethic and sense of social unity.

According to the article, there has been an increase in part-time positions manned by people in their 20’s and 30’s. With youth comes greater energy, and the young are less likely to feel pressure and energy-drain from having kids and mortgages and such, factors that, I assure you from personal experience, slowly drain the energy from you like a Sith lord. There have been plenty of days I thought my kids and my job were killing me. Any day now I expect my coworkers to come in and find me collapsed onto my lab bench, the victim of work-induced heart attack, my dead-lab-rat drool mingling with spilled reagents. All those young people and their wicked energy means the older, more closer-to-death workers have to pump up their effort to compensate. Many of those who died were killed by stroke or heart attack, and I already have a heart condition.

But it’s not just the older Japanese who are suffering. Even the 20- and 30-somethings are seeing an increase in mental health problems. In short, they're being driven crazy by their work load.

A potential antidote for overworked Japanese? HERE

Let’s hope the Japanese work ethic doesn’t come here. I remember a few years ago, one particularly horrible slavemaster – I mean boss – that I had at the time actually suggested that we STACK lab benches, with one person working at the bench on the floor and another person on an elevated platform at a higher bench “like they do in Japan.” I’m not sure if he was telling the truth, but I shiver at the idea, even if it was do-able. Around that time an HR person, who was equally evil, proposed that the R&D teams go to nights shifts, too. Luckily they are both gone, now.

Lately I’ve been rebelling a bit and haven’t come in much at night or on the weekends. I just haven’t had the energy. I thought I was slacking, but now I have a legitimate excuse. “Sorry, boss, but I can’t come in this weekend. It may kill me!”

Did my heart flutter? Ooh, my arm just went numb. I'm . . . I'm . . . Gaackk! . . . .

Hell Froze Over

Holy sh*t, the impossible has happened. I got a generous raise AND a promotion!!

My company hands out promotions like Fort Knox hands out gold. What’s more, I got a raise that was quite a bit beyond what I would have expected. I’m now at the bottom edge of my income bracket, according to at least a couple surveys about folks in my field. I’m actually – gulp – feeling . . . momentarily . . . appreciated. Quick, hold my hand. I think the ground is shaking.

Does this make me less of an angry lab rat? Maybe a little – today. Maybe today I’m more of a “curmudgeon” lab rat. But then I was here working from 10:30PM until 2:30AM frantically analyzing data for a presentation I had to give today, thrown upon me with practically no notice. Eeesh. Maybe my optimism is just “loopiness” from too little sleep.

The other day I had a post where I vetched about Big Talking Head Syndrome, and made a comment to my blogger friend Maggie from Mindmoss that I had no upward mobility. It disillusioned her about the nobility of science as a profession. I guess I can’t complain as much now, though I’m still not moving upward in the sense of changing duties. Even with the promotion, I’m not at the rank many of my peers are at, based on their background, duties, and contributions to the company, but something is better than nothing.

So, Maggie, and my tens of other readers, to keep you from being disillusioned about the nobility of science, below is a list of the things I actually like about my job. I’d better write it now, before some new event at work sets me off. As my lovely wife pointed out to me the other night, it’s not my job I hate, it’s the management (although I guess I see it as a complete package). I think you’ll agree, these are some mighty good things to be thankful for:

1) My evil global biotech company has in its inventory many thousands of reagents and other products, and numerous subsidiary biotech companies with specialized products, just waiting for me to innovate with them.

2) Some of my coworkers are cool.

3) I get paid a decent salary, compared to some.

4) I get decent benefits.

5) I get to play with some nifty technical equipment. I’ve always been a quick learner with these things and love to operate them.

6) I occasionally get to exercise my creativity in preparing samples and coming up with innovative new protocols and products, though much less than I used to.

7) My profession is noble. The products I have made become the tools by which others save the world. The many products I’ve developed have gone on to be used in a wide array of studies to better the human condition, like investigating Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, neural development, cellular division, and animal physiology, to name a few.

8) I have an office with a door and a window, with plenty of room, and I don’t have to share it with anyone.

9) I have a good reputation with most of my coworkers and outside contacts.

Ugg. I’m not feeling so well now. I’ve gotten so used to hating my company that all this talk of liking it isn’t sitting well, like running a marathon and then stopping to eat a grease-dripping Big Mac.

Would you like fries with that promotion? Yes, thank you, and please super size my angst.

Big Talking Head Syndrome

I really hate it when the Big Talking Heads in upper management make snap decisions about projects. Inevitably it's me, or some other lab rat, who has to "make it happen", then we get screwed because the idea was half-assed, yet we are the ones tasked with making it work and get blamed if it doesn't. IF the idea actually works, guess who gets the credit. Not me.

I've seen several of these ideas in the years I've been at my current job. Here's how Big Talking Head Syndrome goes:

Step 1: The smooth-talking founder of a tiny startup biotech gets the ear of someone in upper management and convinces them that their niche product can cure cancer, regrow brain cells, make the blind see again, and bring world peace, all while making a million bucks a year for us.

Step 2: Upper Manager passes the buck to Business Manager, saying, "We've got a new break-through technology, and we're at the ground floor! Delegate it."

Step 3: Business Manager passes the buck to Middle Manager, saying, "I'm not sure what the business opportunity is here, but it must be good if The Boss says so. Do it."

Step 4: Middle manager passes the buck to Angry Lab Rat, saying, "I'm not sure what this technology is good for, but the business manager says Do It. So go make it happen."

Step 5: Angry Lab Rat says, "What the f*ck? Don't you realize we've got 50 other projects on our plate that are already behind schedule?"

Step 6: Middle Manager says, "Sorry, it came from the top. Try to squeeze it in. Oh, and it's top priority. Oh, and you still have to adhere to all your old deadlines for the other projects when they were deemed top priority. Come see me when you have results."

Of course, there's almost never any criteria for pass or fail for the new technology, no scope, no end date to the project, and no organized project plan. Big Talking Heads are apparently immune to the bureaucracy that hinders progress at my level. Eventually, almost all of these projects stretch on for months and months before they give up the ghost, unable to meet expectations. By then the folks at the top have gone on to chase other will-o'-wisps, while I still have a failed project on my record for my annual review. Those projects that actually "succeed" inevitably turn into a low-selling niche product that is discontinued after a few years.

I'm in the midst of one of those projects now. Some yahoos in a new biotech startup have invented a neat little technology. They got the ear of none other than the CEO of my evil global biotech company. The CEO passed it on to the business manager and my R&D director, who called a meeting with the yahoos. I was in that meeting. Admittedly it was a neat technology, and I did a quick analysis of it. After the meeting, I talked with the business manager. Though the technology was "neat", neither he nor I were able to see how the technology could in any way benefit our company. It wasn't the sort of thing we sold, and we couldn't think of a way it could be partnered with our products. Nonetheless, a couple weeks later, my middle manager and I were told by the director that I would be hosting the yahoos and training them how to use their own technology.

Yes, you read me right. They don't know how to use their own "amazing" technology, and I have to teach them. They've been getting suckers (like us) at various universities to do the analysis for them. So I've had to drop two days out of my exceedingly tight schedule to bring them to our site and show them how I do things. Unfortunately, I still have no clue how this is supposed to benefit us, or what, exactly, I'm supposed to be looking for. But when I raised the alarms with my manager, he shrugged and said, "Better do it, since it came from the CEO." This won't be the end of it, I'm certain.

I feel like I'm trying to play chess in the middle of a busy highway while someone at the top of a skyscraper a few blocks away broadcasts strategy tips to me with a megaphone.

The funny thing is that a year ago we instituted a whole new program management system, eliminating gobs of little projects like this one so we could focus on just a few, and requiring a great many hoops to jump through to get any new projects rolling, with complicated and lengthy business plans to justify it all. I can't tell you how many innovative ideas I and others have had that have lingered and died a slow death because lab rats like myself are too low on the totem pole to get through those hoops. Maybe some weren't good ideas, maybe some were "big hitters." We'll never know, since they never came up for debate or had time allocated for pilot experiments. And yet, like I said, Big Talking Heads are immune to this process.

Now, folks at the top are paid to see opportunities and move the company toward them. I can respect that. I can also respect how, at their level, they see more of the "big picture" than I do. But there's a right way and a wrong way to "make it happen." If, by chance, you are one of those Big Talking Heads, here's a word of advice: use Big Talking Head Syndrome only in rare cases which are sure to pay off, have a plan for its implementation, and communicate the plan down the ranks. Otherwise, just let me do my frickin' job.

Is The Company Logo Branded On My Ass, Or Am I Just Square?

A coworker of mine hurt herself while exercising yesterday. Today it hurts her worse, and there is some swelling. We think she pulled a muscle. She needs to go to a clinic or see her doctor, but despite urgings to do so from me and others, she hasn't gone and has continued working, including operating equipment that likely makes the wound worse. "Yeah, I should go," she said, "but I have all this work to do, and I have a meeting this afternoon."

"Why do you continue?" I asked. "Why are you so devoted to this place that you won't even attend to your personal health?" But then I followed this with a self-reminder that I have continuously sacrificed my own personal time and health (usually sleep) to come in late at night and on the weekends to try to catch up with work.

Answered my coworker: "The way I see it is I'm less likely to get fired this way."

I laughed, in a sad sort of way, like chuckling when you see some hapless guy on TV's Funniest Home Videos take a hit in the crotch when his kid misses a baseball and accidentally slams the bat into the family jewels.

Then she asked me why I devote myself to my work so much. I shrugged and replied: "I guess I do it out of an innate desire to innovate and an unquenchable scientific curiosity."

She gave me a shocked and horrified look and uttered: "Oh . . . my . . . god. That sounds like something you would find printed in the company's propaganda magazine."

Yes, I admitted, she was right. I shook my head in self-disappointment. Have I been at this so long I'm starting to talk in corporate-speak? Is my unconscious devotion to my work really that bad? I rushed to the bathroom mirror and check out my forehead. Luckily there is as yet no company logo stamped there above my uni-brow. Then I went to the logbook that shows who was at work after-hours and tallied up the time I'd spent there late at night and on weekends. I counted a total of 12.5 hours in the past month, usually between the hours of 9PM and 1AM. This doesn't count the hours that I came to work early or left late. And I plan to be there several hours tonight, too. I drooped my shoulders and stumbled back to my office, where data analysis awaited me.

I don't work out of a desire for promotion or raises (which are almost non-existent at my company), and getting fired or laid off actually sounds appealing in a weird way. Quitting would be "my fault" and would surely lead to my family living in a cardboard box, yet I'd love the chance to escape. So my coworker's excuse doesn't apply to me. But I must admit to giving in to some of the pressure from my boss. See my previous post on the subject of work hours (HERE).

No, I honestly believe what I said, even if it's in the words my HR department would use. I think any good scientist would feel the same. It's in our blood. Even if we were ditch-diggers we would experiment with the best grip on the shovel, measure the average shovel-fuls of dirt to reach optimum digging efficiency, or examine effects of digging the ditch on neighboring plant and animal species. As long as I am at my job, I will do the best I can – not for the sake of my boss or the welfare of my company, but out of a sincere desire to excel at what I do and to humor the little scientist within me (some would say he's a mad scientist, but he would respond that he is perfectly sane and the rest of the world is mad!). It's sort of like what Gandalf said about Gollum, in The Lord of The Rings. "He both loves and hates the ring, as he both loves and hates himself." Yes, my Precious, I both loves and hates my job. gollum. gollum.

So, yeah, innovation and curiosity are part of who I am, like so many great scientists and lab rats. Someone once said I had the mind of a genius. They're right. I keep it in a jar over my lab bench. (pic)

But would I stay here if I were wounded, instead of seeing a doctor. Hell, no! I know you're reading this, Coworker. Go see a frickin' doctor already!

UPDATE (3/30/07): I wound up going back to work that night from about 10:30PM until 4:15AM! Jesus Christ! When I told my boss about it, all he did was shrug and say, "Oh." No pat on the back for my devotion, no sir-ee-bob. gollum.... By the way, Coworker went to a medical clinic a couple hours after I posted. After several hours of waiting, they finally admitted her, confirmed it was probably a pulled muscle, told her to wear a padded brace where the injury was, and told her to come back if it didn't help.

Get To Work, You Slacker!

People want more for less. I think it's a conserved trait for all humanity. Let's face it, most of us are cheap bastards.

Bosses are no exception. When you're a boss under pressure to produce more in the same amount of time and with the same number of workers, the immediate inclination is to ask your salaried workers to put in more time. I think most of us in white collar work give in to the pressure. Work later, come in at night, come in on the weekend, take work home with you, don't take breaks, work while you eat lunch, or don't eat lunch at all. Why do we put ourselves through this when we could be happier pursuing more rewarding life choices, like going home and watching "Dancing with the Stars" from your beaten-up recliner while eating Haagen-Dazs? Some of us might be fired if we didn't work extra, but I think it's more about the mindset that if you just give in a little more to the boss's urgings you'll be that much more likely to get that extra raise, promotion, or other recognition. To some extent it may be true, but more and more I get the feeling that extra recognition amounts to nothing more impressive than having a smiley-sticker put on your class essay.

I admit to giving in to "boss pressure." Recently my boss and I had a huge project dumped on us from above with a totally unreasonable deadline on it. Instead of pointing out the obvious stupidity of the deadline and the fact that we would be unable to do any of our other work in that timeframe, my boss gave in to The Big Talking Heads and sheepishly agreed to do it. Now I'm stuck with much of the load. So, being an obedient worker bee, I came in last Saturday to do a lab experiment, when I could have taken the kids to the park on that gloriously sunny day. After three hours of work, I realized I had made a mistake at the beginning and had to start over again. Damn! I came back later, at about 9:30PM and worked until almost 2AM. Sadly, these sorts of hours are not uncommon for me (though it isn't usually due to stupid mistakes on my part), but do I ever get a pat on the back for it? Hell no. It just sets the bar higher for my boss's expectations of me. I'm fairly certain I'll be here a couple more nights this week. Before long I may wind up like one of my coworkers who works constantly. He even takes his laptop with him when he camps so he "doesn't fall behind."

In a fit of depression and work-place burnout, I went to the website http://www.despair.com/, where you can find hilarious (yet sad at the same time!) parodies of those stupid motivational posters you find hanging in work spaces. You can even make your own. I've attached a picture of the one I made for myself using their "make your own" webpage.

Yet, despite all this, be glad you aren't a worker in pre-1940's America. According to one study (HERE), Workers in the early part of the 1900's were expected to work as much as 60 hours a week, up to 6 days a week. In the 1880's, it was even higher, at as much as 70 hours a week. The downward trend in hours worked a week may have been due to increases in workplace efficiency due to emerging technology, but the downward trend was halted at 40 hours a week by Congress and FDR, for better or worse for the average worker, in the name of stimulating our economy.

Average work hours per week are slowly increasing again, and working stiffs like me are feeling the pressure. HERE is an excellent report on some of the depressing statistics about work/life balance (Example: "The typical middle income married couple works 3,885 hours per year, an increase of 247 hours or nearly one week more than their counterparts ten years ago."). That work/life imbalance forces us to try to fit our personal lives around the longer work hours, such as making personal calls from work, taking lunch breaks to run simple errands, or necessary web surfing (I have grown very fond of browsing my NetFlix account from work, for instance). Some companies actually hire concierge services and such, in the incredible belief that saving their employees' time keeps them at work. Ptah! Weaklings!

Yeah, I know, you're reading this at work, aren't you? Get to work, you slacker! And I'd better see you at your desk this weekend, too!

It May Be Safer To Lick The Office Toilet Seat Than Your Messy Desk

Let's face it, people are slobs. Even at work, most of us aren't the picture of organizational and hygienic excellence. Take MY office, for instance. I've got stacks of lab books, experimental notes, research journals, and assorted paperwork piled on either side of my computer. Occasionally I have to shove it out of the way just to make room for my mousepad. There are a few areas, such as the space behind my monitor (which sits on the joint of my L-shaped desk) where dust settles and hasn't been cleaned since the government had a budget surplus. I usually eat at my desk, so there are sometimes crumbs laying around. I usually have one or two empty cans of Pepsi sitting on the desk, and I have my share of snacks in my desk drawer, including some tea bags, a box of Raman noodles (for an emergency lunch option), some packaged fruit leather strips, and Altoids ("curiously strong" for my curiously strong bad breath). It's been at least a couple months since I wiped down my keyboard and mouse with an alcohol wipe, and that was just because I had been sick and had to share my computer with someone one afternoon.

Despite my organization and hygiene, I'd still rank myself as about average (well, okay, maybe a little worse than average). Most of us keep snacks in our desks and have at least one good stack of unfiled paperwork. Being an office-eater does take some skill, though I prefer eating out when possible (as I've remarked before: HERE).

Recently a study came out that found the average office desk has a higher bacterial count than the average office toilet:
http://www.physorg.com/news90749958.html

That's right. Swabs of office equipment and belongings have more bacteria than the porcelain throne. Personally, I find it a bit alarming that my desktop has 400 times more bacteria than the spot where I and my colleagues plant our naked, pimply asses.

Interestingly, though women's desks were more organized, they were three to four times more bacteria-laden. The authors believe this is due in part to the fact that women were more likely to have snacks in their desks than men (75% of women), had cosmetics and hand lotions which could harbor bacteria, and were more likely to interact with young children (which, as I can assure you from personal experience, are little illness-incubators). But before us men can become too cocky about this result, we should note that the study found men's wallets to be the single worst item for bacterial concentration.

So far I haven't learned what species of bacteria were found. I'd say there's a pretty good chance most of them are benign. Remember, not all bacteria are "bad" bacteria.

The authors went on to report that desks that are regularly disinfected have 25% fewer bacteria. They suggest disinfecting once a day. Not likely, given my hectic schedule, but at least once a month would be a step up for me.

So the next time I head to my second office (the one with the flushable office chair and tiled floor), I'll remember this report. Maybe it will spur me to clean my office more often.

Or maybe I'll just eat my Raman noodles in the bathroom stall.

My Company's Damned Annual Review Process

WARNING: The following diatribe may cause serious damage to the frontal cortex, morale, and general will to live for corporate employees. Do not continue if you have a history of heart conditions, strokes, hypertension, depression, irritable bowel, peptic ulcers, distemper, athlete's foot, or hangnails. If during the reading of this post you experience heart fluctuations, spastic jerking of facial muscles, a feeling of anger and/or suicidal thoughts, aneurisms, or erectile dysfunction, stop reading immediately and seek medical help. Rare but potential long-term conditions may include Tourette's Syndrome and mild dementia.

I'm smack in the middle of my company's f*cking annual review period. By "annual review period" I mean that SIX MONTH period of time when all of the big talking heads in the company decide the fate of my career over the next year, during which I have absolutely no voice other than what my immediate boss has to say about me. Hopefully I've impressed enough people with my amazing powers of innovation, or kissed enough ass, that they have a favorable impression of me and will recommend me for promotion. Unfortunately, I'm not into kissing buttocks and stroking egos, so that leaves me only the "amazing powers of innovation" part.

That's right. Six months. The process began in November with me filling out a five-page online form where I have to describe how great I am, how I've met my goals from last year, little essays about my strengths and weaknesses, and rating my own performance. The process will end in April when my supervisor hands me a page of paper that says whether or not I receive a promotion and/or pay raise (gollum!).

Why does it take so long? Good question. But then it's as inefficient as a lot of the decision-making going on here.

In the months in-between, that form that I filled out was passed to my supervisor, who added his own comments, changed the ratings as he saw fit, and decided for himself if I met the goals. Of course the goals are meaningless, since they were written down over a year ago and the company and its programs have taken a 180-degree turn since then, as they do every 6-12 months. And my current supervisor isn't the one I had then. But that didn't stop us from writing new goals and pretending we wrote them together last year.

Unfortunately that long form that we worked on and the goals that I wrote down and debated about with my supervisor are meaningless for the decision to promote me; only I and my supervisor are likely to ever read it. So why spend days on it at all, I ask? Every year it's the same circle jerk. Basically it serves no other purpose than to be a mechanism for us to sit down and for him to toss me comments both good and "constructive," but if he and I have a good, working relationship, like we are supposed to, why bother? There's nothing he said in that meeting that he and I haven't already said before. But bosses have to be "constructive" about something in such meetings, and since I am a good employee, I got critiqued not on results or projects, but about how some third party thought I meant one thing when I really meant another, how I could have worded an email to be more politically-correct, and how I could work on smiling more. Meanwhile the hour I spent listening to this could have been spent doing the experiments that I have to do. Now I'll have to work late. I'll try to remember to smile more as I come in late tonight to finish my work.

In the coming month I am supposed to meet with my supervisor again to decide my goals for the next year. These goals are supposed to be in line with the corporate goals which were handed down to us in spreadsheet form last Friday, along with an hour-long pep talk. The goal spreadsheet is eight pages long. Reading through the corporate goals is an interested exercise in interpreting "corporate speak," populated with curious acronyms and abbreviations, inspirational catch phrases, and business numbers in hundreds of millions of dollars by quarter. Nice. You can tell it was written by folks at the very top who have little understanding of what rational goals mean for lab rats working at the benches. To the upper management: Just tell me what f*cking projects you want me to do and I'll make the company another million dollars. Other than that, don't bother me.

Now, let me say that both my supervisor and his boss, the R&D director, are good, sincere people. I honestly believe they are trying to help both me and my company succeed. But what we are working with here is an annual review process which is as efficient as paddle-boating in a hurricane, and just as meaningless. It needs to change in a big way. And only the big talking heads are in a position to change anything. I suggested to my boss that he please pass on to his bosses some suggestions from me, and I told him he could feel free to mention my name and that I'd be happy to talk with anyone about it. (Yes, I know what you're thinking. Why the hell can't I just fly under the radar like everyone else and bear the pain!).

What were my suggestions for him to pass on? 1) Let's pare down the process to, say, three months, 2) Let's either lose the meaningless form or have it actually count for something, and 3) Let's devise goals that actually mean something and are flexible enough to account for the constant rate of change at my company. Maybe instead of formulating them for a year, we can review them every six months.

My boss just smiled. Somehow I don't think my suggestions are going anywhere.

To my tens of readers: I'm almost afraid to ask, but I have a strange sado-masochistic twinge: What is your company's annual review process like? Is my evil global biotech company alone in this dysfunction, or is this drooling behemoth the industry standard?

My Managers May Be Neanderthals

I've always suspected that certain managers at my evil global biotech company are part-Neanderthal.

Okay, I'm stereotyping. That's a bad thing. I'm working on the cliché assumption that Neanderthals were sort of brutish and lacked good reasoning skills. Picture, if you will, a club-wielding, exceedingly hairy man with a prominent brow ridge, short and slightly bent over, and dressed in bedraggled animal skins, who chooses a mate based on who can be dragged away easiest by their hair. I wouldn't want to be racist (or, I guess, the best term is *species-ist*) about Neanderthals. For all anyone knows, they were tender, loving, hippie types. Just about the only thing known about their culture, as far as I can tell, is that they lived in tight-knit social groups and resisted changing their technology. That's apparently why they died out – they didn't adapt to changes in the European climate and didn't cross social groups.

Now imagine if those Neanderthal types were leading a company. Resistant to new ideas from outside their tight-knit group. Not thinking things through in a long-term, rational manner. Dying out because they didn't adapt quickly enough. Yeah, I stick to my original suspicion.

A recent news story suggests that there may, indeed, be real-life Neanderthals working alongside me:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2796508

The finding of a skull in a cave in Romania suggests that Cro-Magnon _Homo sapiens_ (early modern humans) may have interbred with Neanderthals (_Homo erectus_), creating a hybrid of the two. HERE is the nitty-gritty research paper. The skull exhibits aspects found on the skulls of both species and dates back 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, to a time when the two species were found together in the same geographic area.

Though their cultures inhabited the same regions, there isn't much evidence that Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals actually mixed culturally or even with warfare, but who knows? Maybe some desperate Cro-Magnon gal drank a little too much fermented ox milk (or whatever the heck they drank), saw a Neanderthal guy from across the field, and thought, "You know, I always wanted to get shagged by Fred Flintstone. Yaba daba doo!"

This isn't a new idea. Back in 1999, the skeleton of a 4-year old boy was found in Portugal, his bones dating back about 24,500 years. HERE is a link to that story. His bone structure suggested he had some Neanderthal ancestry. The interesting thing with that finding is that Neanderthals were thought to have died out by then, so the boy wasn't a "love child" of fermented ox milk, but rather the offspring of generations of hybrids. If so, there's a good chance that the lineage continued onward, perhaps into you and me!

So are some of my managers actually part-Neanderthal, acting on their primitive impulses? Well, let's just say the Cro-Magnon in me isn't interested in mixing.

Science Workshops and Conferences, Part II (eating out)

You won't find me saying many great things about my evil global biotech company on this blog, but this post is an exception.

Attending conferences and workshops is often difficult because I have to deal with being away from my family, travelling, long hours, and catching up with piles of work when I get back. But one of the great joys of attending conferences and workshops is the food.

As you may recal from previous posts, my eating habits aren't exactly Weight Watcher's. My lunch a couple days ago, for instance, was composed of an airport hot dog with mayo and mustard, washed down with a Pepsi. Under normal conditions, I'm often too busy even to eat lunch, and supper is often eaten in stages as I and my wife feed our kids.

But when I travel on the company's dime, I eat like a friggin' king. Before you gasp in horror at my apparent lack of corporate responsibility, please note there is a travel policy which limits how much can be spent on meals. For a city as large and expensive as the one I'm in right now, that limit is $60 per day per person. Since eating out is my only option, costs can really add up. In large cities, a plate of good food can cost $20. Still, $60 goes a long way.

I'm not a breakfast person, and lunch is usually just a sandwich, so that leaves a gourmet budget for supper. We're talking appetizers, fancy drinks, large dishes of exotic food, and a decadent dessert. "Would you like a refill on that drink, sir?" You betcha, Pierre, and don't forget the little umbrella! And since I tend to eat with likeminded colleagues, the table becomes a gourmet smourgesbourg of monumental proportions.

Tonight was a meditteranean feast worthy of Alexander the Great. Yesterday: all I could eat of high-quality sushi. Domo arigato, evil biotech company!

Science Workshops and Conferences, Part I (presentations and language)

Today, and for the next couple days, I am attending a scientific workshop in another state. For those of you who aren't lab rats, this is an event where a couple hundred scientists get together in a cramped, sweaty room and watch other scientists describe their very important and earth-shattering breakthroughs. At least, that's the idea. In reality, the attendee in the audience winds up half-sleeping through half of the presentations as he waits for the couple presentations that actually relate to his own research, much of which may already be found in the presentor's published papers. But there is always some nugget or two that make it worthwhile.

Over the years I've heard debates about what language is most important in the world for commerce or films or whatever. For science, the universal language is English, hands down. Sure, you'll find journals written in Russian or German or Chinese, but the vast majority of science is written in English. Since science is an international affair, many of the speakers at workshops and conferences are bound to speak English as a second language (or third or fourth), so sometimes the accent is so strong you only understand about 60% of what was said, even if you're familiar with the science. If you work in science, being around folks from all over the world on a daily basis is normal. Most days at work I interact with coworkers from Russia, England, Ukraine, Taiwan, Mexico, and China. I really get a kick when I overhear conversations, in English, between people from different languages. The other day I passed by three coworkers (from China, Russia, and India), all speaking English with heavy accents from their native languages. It's hard for me to understand them sometimes. How the heck do they understand each other?

More later. Time to get back to the very groundbreaking science presentations....

Life in the Rat Maze

Today is a simple blog post, since I have almost no time.

Here's a link to a cartoon that pretty much sums up my day:

Non Sequitur: http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2006/12/27/

You decide which character best describes me: the scientists, or the lab rats.

'Nuf said.

Inclement Weather? Get To Work!

Today it is snowy and icy here, in Oregon. All the schools, and most of the community colleges and universities, are closed for business. But I went to work anyhow, even though I have to commute from a little way's out of town. I had to go, since my evil global biotech company is open for business and I have no vacation time left after the Christmas holiday.

My company doesn't believe in such a thing as "inclement weather." They have a "weather hotline" phone number that employees can call to find out if the company is closed for business due to bad roads or whatever, but in eight years of working here, I've never known them to use it. I don't even call it anymore.

A new employee named Dan (who is also a regular reader of this blog – Hi, Dan!) was talking to me and another lab rat about this a month ago. Being new and perhaps a touch naïve about the company, he asked when the company had used the hotline in the past. I and the other employee immediately burst out laughing. In my time here, there have been incidents of seriously icy and snowy road emergencies, major floods, massive power failures, a major gas leak a stone's throw down the road, tornado-strength winds, and even a minor earthquake, and the company has never closed or sent its employees home early.

A couple years ago there was so much ice and snow that the roads department declared a state of emergency and broadcast a warning to the public to stay off the roads unless it was a life or death situation. My company was still open, though. I have an SUV and was able to make it to work in four-wheel drive. I think a horse-drawn sleigh would have been a better choice. Cars were stranded all along the way. Many folks simply had to take what leave time they could because they couldn't get there. The parking lot out back of my building has a slight incline. The asphalt was so icy that the cars parked there were sliding down the incline and bumping into each other. The management caught a lot of flak from the employees for that day. Management's excuse was that the top two people in the company, whose job it was to make the call to close, were traveling abroad and the folks delegated to make the decision didn't know they were supposed to do anything. We all rolled our eyes at that one.

You know the motto usually associated with the post office, right? "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." (HERE is a link to the interesting story on that, by the way). Well, perhaps my evil global biotech company should have a similar motto:

"Neither ice, nor flood, nor earthquake, nor lava rolling in the streets, nor a nuclear explosion stays these lab rats from swift completion of their experiments – or else!"

If I just lived at work it would solve the whole dilemma, don't you think?

UPDATE (1/12/07): At the end of the day yesterday, presumedly in response to complaints from employees, management sent out an email saying that the weather hotline had been discontinued. Instead, we are to base our weather policy on what the nearby university does. However, I found out that the university hasn't closed due to weather in 20 years. In other words, no real change in policy, and Management has only "passed the buck."

Saving Humanity Can Wait Until It's Profitable

One of the big differences between working in academic science and working for my evil global biotech company is the degree of visibility. When I was a young and optimistic college student, my science professors drilled into my innocent and naïve brain the belief that Science, in its purest form, is all about sharing data and ideas. When you generate data or brilliant ideas, you project that information to your immediate colleagues in regularly-scheduled seminars. When you come to some significant conclusions to a project, you write it up and publish it, but only after a jury of your peers reads it and agrees with your methodology, and novel innovations are passed around and added upon by others. In this way you get a higher degree of unbiased results, promote the sharing of ideas and technology, add to human enlightenment, and generate a brighter future for all mankind [insert heavenly music here].

Well, even in academia things don’t always work that way, of course. All of us lab rats can think of examples of science faculty who have manipulated data, hidden negative results, or kept important findings under wraps until they had a chance to publish and get the coveted grant monies or patents. This is human nature and self-preservation at work. Still, even *my* jaded mind thinks that academia still strives to reach those lofty goals.

But not evil global biotech companies. This is one reason I label them “evil.” Oh, sure, they talk the good talk. Every biotech conglomerate has snappy mottos like “Getting closer to the patient” or “Bringing vision to medical discovery” which they splatter on all their marketing publications and preach to their employees at pep rallies, but you’d be hard-pressed to find one of their employees who truly believes that company profits don’t outweigh the good of mankind. I’ve led the development of dozens of products for my company, and these days no innovative idea moves forward until it goes through a gauntlet of business cases, voice-of-customer calls, and marketing considerations before any significant amount of lab testing is conducted.

What? That novel compound to study multiple sclerosis will only make a profit of $500K in its first year? Chump change! We only deal in millions, baby! Secret away that brilliant idea until we think we can earn more on it, if ever.

And that brings me to my main point. Given that this is the “season of giving” and our thoughts are supposed to be on the good of mankind, let us in biotech pause for a moment to make a New Year’s resolution, shall we? Repeat after me:

“I, Lab Rat, do hereby swear, on pain of my kidneys exploding, that I shall consider the good of mankind above profits. If the good of mankind matches the profits, I shall continue to shamelessly make millions for my evil global biotech company. If the good of mankind is not profitable, I shall henceforth find a legal way to let the academic community in on my secret, such that their brilliance may build upon my genius and help the world thrive. Amen.” [insert heavenly music again]

Personally, I like my kidneys unexploded. When I get off my vacation and return to the hectic life of my company, I think I’ll dredge up an idea or two and find a way to get them “out there.” My company could use some good karma.